THE THIRD EDITION
Corrected and brought down to the End of last Year.

LONDON

Printed by T. Button, Little Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, FOR J. WALLIS, N0. 46, PATERNOSTER-ROW;  CARPENTER AND  CO, BOND-STREET ;  EGERTON,  WHITEHALL ;  VERNOR  AND  HOOD,  POULTRY ; BLACK  AND  PARRY,  LEADENIHALL-STREET, 1801

Quote:

“I confess I was long anxious to find out, whether I was actually the first who applied the principles of geometry to matters of Finance, as it had long before been applied to chronology with great success.  I am now satisfied, upon due inquiry, that I was the first; for during fifteen years I have not been able to learn that any thing of a similar nature had ever before been produced.”    (Introduction, pages xiii-ix) 

Literature:

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), - Playfair, William (1759-1823), inventor of statistical graphs and writer on political economy, by Ian SPENCE, available online at - http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/spence/Spence_2004.pdf

H. Gray FUNKHOUSER (1937) Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data, in: Osiris, Vol. 3 (1937), pp. 269-404, Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society

Patricia COSTIGAN-EAVES & Michael MACDONALD-ROSS, William Playfair (1759-1823), in: Statistical Science, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), pp. 318-326

Howard WAINER  & Ian SPENCE (eds.), The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary – William Playfair, (annotated reprints), Cambridge University Press, 2005

Very much worth visiting:

Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization, by Michael FRIENDLY & Daniel J. DENIS, online originally here: http://euclid.psych.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/milestone/sec1.html but now moved to - http://datavis.ca/milestones/index.php?page=introduction

Bruce BERKOWITZ, Playfair - The True Story of the British Secret Agent Who Changed How We See the World, George Mason University Press, 2018 -

Playfair’s Plan: “To fabricate one hundred Millions of assignats and spread them in France by every means in my power…”, Source: The William Playfair Correspondence Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA, USA, in: BERKOWITZ, Bruce, 2018, Appendix A, pp. 351

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